Mary Bella didn't remember when she woke up and then she did: he hadn't come. The train was late and Woods had telephoned from the station. It was nearly ten by then and she must have fallen asleep waiting on the sofa. She didn't remember going up to bed.

It was very early now, she could tell by the light. The air coming in at the half-open window was cold and she pulled the bedclothes up. If he had come he would be in the room she had helped to get ready for him, the primroses she'd picked in the vase on the dressing-table. She wondered if he had.

When she slept again she dreamed he hadn't, that it was wrong about the train being late, that Woods came back alone and said a stranger hadn't got off that train. But when she went down to the breakfast-room and listened at the door there was a voice she didn't know. "Now why can I guess who this is!" he said when she went in, and held his hand out for her to shake. They had all summer, he said in the schoolroom afterwards. They had a lot to do.

It was she who called the nursery the schoolroom when she first had lessons there. Woods found a slate that might do for a blackboard, but it wasn't necessary since everything could be written in her different exercise-books. Mary Bella was twelve that summer, thirteen when September came.

He wore blue jerseys, and blue shirts which her mother called Aertex, and tweed ties and whipcord trousers. Her mother said he reminded her of Leslie Howard in Gone With the Wind, her father that he was confident this chap would get her into Evelynscourt, which was the purpose of his being here. "Enough for one morning," he said himself every day when it was twelve o'clock and they went about the farm then to see how things were getting on. Later in the afternoon they would ride to Worley Edge and sometimes on to Still Fell, or walk to Grattan's Tomb.

"Very Heathcliffian," he said when there were riders racing one another on the moors one day and she didn't understand what he meant. He read to her on their walks, or she to him, depending on what book it was. It made her sad that the summer had to end. He said it never would, because remembering wouldn't let it.

❦

Anthony was twenty-two then and, not knowing what to do with himself after an undistinguished university career, he considered that a few months adding what he could to the education of a child in a country house would be better than doing nothing. The letter he received in reply to his answer to the advertisement was in an educated hand, and honestly laid out the disadvantages he would encounter if he took the post. We are close to moorland, and remote. You may find the sense of solitude oppressive. But the location turned out to be less intimidating than this suggested, the house – called Old Grange – grander than he had imagined, the farm prosperous. Anthony delighted in the place as soon as he became familiar with it, and in Mary Bella too. Small for her age, sharp-witted and volatile, she smiled a lot and laughed a lot, the beginning of beauty already in her features, her manner touched with a child's unspoilt charm. In the schoolroom she disliked the dreariness of geography, and geometry's uninteresting straight lines and the silly shape of trapeziums. History caught her imagination, she learned poetry easily, had a way with spelling and with words. And that summer, which was warm, with hardly any rain, she developed a fondness for Anthony that he could not dismiss or pretend he didn't notice and which, when September came, caused him more unease than he admitted to himself. He left Old Grange the day after Mary Bella's thirteenth birthday, leaving behind far more than their excursions on the moors, their conversations, or the birds Mary Bella identified for him, far more than the hay-making he had helped with, or a family's friendliness. He left what he thought would be impossible to forget – the sadness Mary Bella had spoken of, and something like desperation in her eyes when the last day came and they said good-bye to one another. But Anthony did forget. He made himself, considering it better that he should.

❦

Mary Bella passed, quite comfortably, the entrance examination for Evelynscourt, where her mother had been happy in her time but where Mary Bella wasn't. Too often and too easily she remembered the summer of the schoolroom and nothing at Evelynscourt was like that. She didn't talk about the summer to anyone, not wanting to; and in the holidays she concealed her feelings every time she returned from riding to the places they had ridden to or when she sat alone in the schoolroom, the books of some holiday task or other spread out on the ink-stained table unheeded. She was reconciled to never seeing Anthony again, but his voice was there, as if it always would be, telling her about Jeanne d'Arc, and Elizabeth Tudor, whom he had called the Lonely Queen, and Charlemagne and Marie Antoinette. It drew her into the world of the Marshalsea, brought her to Dorcote Mill and Wildfell Hall, made Haworth Rectory as real as it had been.

❦

Anthony became a cartographer, astonishing himself that he had not sooner been attracted by a profession that at once interested and absorbed him and in which, he discovered, he was both skilled and gifted. A few years after his months at Old Grange he had met at a party a slim, fair-haired girl called Nicola who, when they knew one another better, accompanied him on his commissions abroad. She took photographs for him in the uncharted region of the Abruzzi and in the new, mapless towns of Africa, in rebuilt Germany and where motorways now changed for ever the old roads of England. In time, they married. Two children – both girls – were born, a house acquired in the leafy London suburb of Barnes and, flourishing in contented motherhood and Anthony's devotion, Nicole's prettiness acquired a quiet confidence that had not been there before. Anthony went alone on his commissions and liked returning more than going away. Each time he came back, his children seemed a little different and another aspect of his small family was more than it had been before. His absences kept love alive, and interest in his children's pursuits did not wane as otherwise it might have. On Saturdays, if the week had been free of disobedience, there was the visit to Richmond Park, tea afterwards in the Maids of Honour. On Sundays Nicola's mother took the girls away for their day with her, returning them undamaged by excessive affection, for she was careful about that. How fortunate they all four were! Anthony often said, or Nicola did. Neither wondered how married life might have been if they had married other people, how different their children would be. It was enough to know that being married to one another was what they wanted, that neither wanted more. "Tell them about Old Grange," Nicola often urged, and Anthony would recall for the girls what he remembered of it. They always listened, as Nicola did too. Because it sounded so lovely, she said, and the girls agreed.

❦

On the morning of her sixtieth birthday Mary Bella's mother died suddenly, without an illness's warning. Mary Bella was twenty-four then, had been at Old Grange since she left Evelynscourt, and was content to be there. She took her mother's place quite naturally, but in spite of the comfort and convenience of her presence, her father was unable to come to terms with the tragedy that had so unexpectedly occurred. He did not ever recover his good humour or his affection for the house and the farm. In the darkness of his mood he took to drink a little and to riding recklessly over the moors as if in search of the happiness that had been taken from him. One day he did not come back and was later found after his horse returned alone. The fall was a bad one, but perhaps achieved for him what he wanted. He did not regain consciousness.

Mary Bella might have sold Old Grange, passed on to its new owner the horses and her small band of farm workers, the Charollais herd and several thousand sheep. Instead, she remained, and often during the lonely months that followed her father's death she sat in the schoolroom as she had as a child, her sole companion a spaniel who, with age, had become blind. She knew she was living in the past, that it would always be here, around her, that she was part of it herself.

❦

It was not sentiment that brought Anthony back to the Yorkshire moors. By chance, his profession did, and when he found himself one morning not far from Worley Edge it was an impulse, stirred by curiosity, that caused him to park his car less than a mile from Old Grange. He walked then, skirting the walled garden and the farm buildings when he came to them. There was a silence about the place, a tranquillity quite at odds with the clatter of the yard, the hurrying and the bustle that had lived on in his recollections. Not knowing why he passed the house by, he followed a right of way he remembered.

The morning, in early April, was fine. Except for sheep, the moors were empty. No horses raced there, no solitary figure – a movement in the distance – climbed to Grattan's Tomb: going on, Anthony realised he had been expecting to see that. He remembered the places where they had rested on their walks, where he had read from Wuthering Heights or listened to another page of The Chimes, or where he had insisted that only French should he spoken.

He turned before he reached Still Fell. Carelessly selective, his memory had misled him. Only once had there been horses racing on the moors; it was unlikely that they would have been there today at this time, and long ago the child he had taught would surely have left so remote a house. He turned and walked back the way he had come, for a moment hesitated, and then passed between the avenue's two grey pillars.

The big, wide front door was as it always had been, sunburnt pale, in need again of paint. He went to the side entrance, a door without a knocker or a bell, bolted only at night. When he pushed it open the same picture – trapeze performers above a circus ring – still decorated one wall of the long, cold corridor that led to the kitchen and the sculleries. There was a murmur of voices, the rattle occasionally of a knife or fork put down. "Hello," Anthony called out, and his voice silenced everything.

In the kitchen the faces around the table were not at first familiar. Six or seven men, a slight dark-haired woman in a blue dress, looked back at him.

"Hello," he said again and the woman stood up and he knew at once that she was Mary Bella.

"Good heavens!" she greeted him, and two of the older men stood up, too, and he knew then who they were. They nodded at him and he shook hands with them.

"You've come to lunch!" Mary Bella was amused in a way he had not forgotten, her sudden laughter seeming to brim over as it enlivened her features. Once long, sometimes plaited, her hair was tidily drawn back.

"How are you, sir?" One of the men who'd stood up pulled out a chair for him.

"It's a shank of lamb," Mary Bella said, spooning some on to a plate.

The men finished their food. There was more talk from the older two, reminiscing about the past they associated with him. Then they shook hands again and all the men went off together.

"Gosh," Mary Bella murmured, gazing at Anthony in a way he remembered also.

❦

Driving back to London, Anthony didn't wonder why he'd stayed so long. "Walk with me a little," Mary Bella had begged, and it felt natural that he should, that they should walk where they had before, that she should take him to the schoolroom, that he should stay for hours when he hadn't intended to.

He had heard about her mother's death, her father's so soon afterwards. It was the fate of an only child, Mary Bella said, to inherit what couldn't be refused. She wasn't complaining. There was nothing of that in her voice, and she smiled when she said it, as if it was a comedy that she should own everything because there was no one else. Her smile came often, as it used to. Her laughter too.

"I wondered," she had said, "if ever you would come back."

She made tea for them and the flowery china was the same, the cake the one her mother most often made. He said he had become a cartographer.

A man who hadn't been in the kitchen earlier came in and Anthony had recognised the lean, baffled features of the man waiting on the ill-lit station platform the night the train was so very late.

"I saw the car," Woods remarked in bewildered tones that hadn't changed. "I said to myself who's was it?"

Tired of the motorway he was on, Anthony drove off it. Near Melton Mowbray he stopped in a village and had a drink in the bar of a hotel. After another he didn't want to drive on and spent the night there. He dreamed of the schoolroom as it was, its windows wedged to keep them from rattling, specks of soot on the unlit kindling in the grate. Willows whiten, aspens quiver, Mary Bella recited for him, Little breezes dusk and shiver … Once he had been woken in the night by her father, who needed help delivering a calf, and afterwards they sat drinking whisky until dawn. Unopened letters were always scattered on the table in the hall. Inaccurate clocks were everywhere.

In the morning Anthony knew he shouldn't have gone back. A letter came, his handwriting on the envelope. She propped it up on the dresser, to be read when she was alone. "I never thought of you as patient," she had confessed the day he came back. "But of course you must have been."

She remembered his saying once that patience was worthwhile, and while she waited until the evening, his letter still where she had left it, she thought that that was probably true. How very strange, seeing you again, she read at last. I passed the house by, thinking that time should perhaps be left where it had settled. But I wouldn't have forgiven myself if I hadn't changed my mind.

She had been kind, the letter said. Your family's hospitality is all it ever was. She wondered where he lived. He hadn't told her, and the letter had only London as an address. He'd married someone. She could tell, although he hadn't said that either. She wondered if there were children.

The letter was precious and she folded it into the folds he'd made and put it away. It didn't matter that she couldn't reply. He had come back.

❦

Anthony hadn't made it happen. It had happened because it was part of something else, of what had been impossible and now was not. He told himself that, but it made no difference. He tried to push it all away, to deny that time, only by passing, could contradict so easily and so naturally, but he found he couldn't. Too much was there already, too much had coloured too many moments since they had walked again on the moors, since in the kitchen afterwards she had made tea, since in their schoolroom he had wanted her.

The moors were vast, he reminded himself. He could go back and walk alone there, seeing from afar the house, the farm, and now and again a lonely rider. There could be that.

But when Anthony returned he went at once to the house, and after that he always did.

❦

Nicola lived with her bewilderment, aware that it wasn't much to have to live with. Yet each morning, when she woke, she felt uneasy, and didn't want to think. And in the daytime on her own – cleaning, cooking, in a shop – she searched for the calm that had always been hers to call upon, but could not find it. She tried to believe that what she dreaded was only in what she wondered, but could not. Disquiet did not recede, and still the dread was there.

❦

A long flat stone marked Grattan's grave. Half fallen, crooked on what was once a hillock and now hardly higher than the surrounding turf, it bore no inscription. Myth claimed this grave, made of its unknown dead an ill-met presence, fearsome on the moors, lone and mad, a chieftain of his ancient time.

"How the past holds on!" Anthony remarked, and Mary Bella knew he was not referring to what an unlettered stone had inspired, but to the past that was theirs. Often their thoughts touched before words expressed them. When Mary Bella felt sometimes that the hiatus that separated, for them, one time from another she knew he felt it too. Someone else, not he, had lived his other life: that fantasy, in silence, was shared.

The August sky was pale, without a cloud, the day as lovely as any Mary Bella had known. The grass around the grave was grazed to a springy shortness, a single clump of cranesbill grown up again from what the sheep had left behind. "How good this summer is too!" Mary Bella murmured. "How good that you have come again today!"

Idyll he had written for her once and she had loved the word, and more than ever loved it now. A happiness, he had written too. Since he'd come back they had not said, and did not say it now, that they would be together in the house. They knew they would be. Because the house, the moors, were where together they belonged.

❦

In the dead time of a Sunday afternoon Anthony told the wife he had once loved that their marriage, unchanged for her, had become for him a mistake. He told her gently, in the garden, choosing this time to do so, since their children were with their grandmother and would not be back for more than another hour. The deckchairs they were sitting in were close together because the garden's paved area was restricted.

"It is a shock," he said. "I know it is." He held a hand out and she took it, seeming not quite to realise what she was doing.

Autumn had come, its sunshine a compensation after a disappointing summer. The leaves of shrubs were not yet withering, were only lank, less green. Quite soon the dusk of evening would be there in the afternoon, Nicola had earlier that day remarked.

Her book was open on her knees and she searched for the bookmark she had dropped, then slipped it into place. She had said nothing in response to Anthony's revelation and she didn't now. He watched her walking among their small flowerbeds, picking here and there a weed, gazing down at Michaelmas daises that yesterday hadn't been in bloom. When she returned to the deckchairs she said that she had known. Her hope that she was wrong was a pretence: she'd known she should not hope.

"Don't say more now," she begged. "Please. Not yet."

She wound around a finger a blade of couch grass she'd picked.

He'd left it too long, Anthony thought. All of it was worse because he'd left it so long.

The couch crass cut her when she was careless with it and she threw it away. She put her finger to her lips and he offered to get something for it. She shock her head.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She tried to read. "Don't go," he had thought she would plead, but she hadn't. She didn't plead in any way at all, nor allow her tears to come. "I'm sorry, Nicola," he said again.

She shook her head, not looking up from the page that hadn't been turned, and still wasn't in the silence she had asked for. A car door banged and then their children were there, calling out as they ran into the garden, Amelia nine, Susie five.

❦

Autumn brought with it the bitter wind that, every autumn, blew across the moors. Sheep huddled close, rivulets and bogland froze. Snow came.

But the idyll that had begun in sunshine was still there, its unhurried days, though briefer now, as much a pleasure. Anthony no longer drove away from Old Grange to begin a journey that familiarity had made uninteresting. His books were packed into half-empty bookcases, his coloured inks and pens arranged to his liking on the schoolroom table. A map of the old town of Kishinev – his first commission – was framed and on a wall, his clothes hung beside Mary Bella's in the wardrobe that had been hers and now was theirs.

Her life had changed less than his. The wages of the men still had to be paid every week, their midday meal cooked, her mother's shortcuts with roasts and stews remembered. She kept the farm accounts as she had before. She was responsible and in charge, continuing to make her own contribution to how things should be, what differences were necessary in a different time. A dish-washer for the lunchtime dishes because there were so many made for a less busy day, as other contemporary devices did. The Aga was electric now, and it was warm in the house, as it never was before. The dog who had been Mary Bella's companion during her time of solitude was suspicious of another presence, but it didn't matter. Nothing did, and the days that so smoothly became weeks, then months, were unlike any that Anthony or Mary Bella had experienced before, and both believed that nothing could disturb the contentment of being together. But as November ended, Mary Bella one morning at breakfast handed across the table a letter addressed in blue, clear handwriting. She knew at once, although she hadn't seen the writing before, that it was his wife's. She watched Anthony reading a single, tidily filled page. He read it twice before he gave it to her. "Nothing can be done about this," his only comment was.

The older of his two children was starving herself. No reason for her doing so was given, but Mary Bella could guess and knew that Anthony could too.

They did not talk about the letter that morning, or all day. Anthony took it away and Mary Bella imagined he burnt it when he was lighting the drawing-room fire. She never saw it again.

But its contents could not so easily be eluded. They both knew that, and when the post came the following morning the blue handwriting was there again.

"They have taken her into hospital," Anthony said when he read it. "For observation, so they say."

Mary Bella took the letter from him. It said more than he had quoted, but not much. She gathered up the breakfast dishes. He poured more coffee. He said:

"There's nothing to be observed. Nothing mysterious to be discovered. Nothing that isn't known."

A child had found the pain of her father's absence too much to bear. Silent at first, she cried all day for several days and then began to starve herself. They ask that you should be told at once, the clear round writing recorded.

The day he left his family, Susie had helped him to carry his books to the car, following him every few moments with another from the pile in the hall. Amelia didn't speak. She didn't come out of her room. But that would pass, he had told himself.

❦

At the hospital they declared that there was nothing particularly unusual about this variation of a child's reaction to extreme distress. They were optimistic and reassuring, and Anthony's presence brought about a recovery that was maintained, as other recoveries had not been. Eventually it was he who drove Amelia home again, and he stayed for longer than he'd meant to, sleeping on a downstairs sofa and often in the night going to gaze at the somnolent features of his affectionate daughter. They looked as tired as an old woman's, but whenever he touched her forehead with his lips she opened her eyes and sometimes even smiled. Amelia had been born with difficulty but had never before been difficult herself. He remained for more than a week, during which she made amends for the trouble she had caused. She said she wanted to be a cartographer and Anthony was pleased. He understood and was forgiving. He wasn't angry when he was with her.

But three days after he drove into the yard at Old Grange he learned that she'd again begun to starve herself.

❦

Mary Bella tried not to dwell on what was happening. It wasn't her place to make suggestions and anyway she could think of none. She felt uncomfortable and lost, belonging in what had come about and yet outside it. Anthony had spoken hardly at all about the family he had deserted, his tone when he did so now impersonal, as if he considered that in the circumstances it should be. Of the wife he was still married to, Mary Bella knew little more than her name and that she wrote letters in blue ink, with a fountain pen, not a ballpoint. There were no photographs of her at Old Grange, none that Mary Bella had seen of the two children who had been born. A house had a few times been mentioned, no more than where it was.

Yet out of so little, images came, and voices spoke. As in the schoolroom once Jeanne d'Arc had ridden into battle, as precious stones had glittered on the great high collar of Elizabeth Tudor, so shadows now were more than shadows. The knife that so cruelly and so often fell, the heads that rolled into a mire of blood, the treachery of plots, through their own drama became reality.

A loss that is unbearable does now, the bitterness of a quiet wife. The room that has been his is no one's. Its shelves are empty, its drawers are light, his chair is in a corner. The household is bereft, but the pictures on its walls, the patterns on its carpets, are as they always were, and things on tables are. They take away the child again.

❦

Wind whined and whistled, gusts spluttered. On the moors conversation was lost, began again, was lost again. For warmth Mary Bella wore clothes that were rough and of the farm, the coarseness of tweed, and shabby corduroy, making more of the delicacy in features that Anthony still often saw as a child's. Knowing Mary Bella twice – her mind, her nature, her laughter, her sadness too – he had twice considered her unique, the second time as lovers do about each other.

But in all this Anthony's instinct was as it always was: not ever to allow in himself the kind of tribulation that haunted Mary Bella. His way was to suppress, to conceal, to be protected. The cartographer's world he had been drawn to was rational and understandable, beyond imagination's interference. He delighted in its accuracy and precision, and made of it what wanted him to make, discarding what had no purpose.

"We are here, we are together," he said while the raw cold nagged. "We live with consequences. We have to, and we can."

❦

Mary Bella wondered if they could. Perfection began when he came back, when he called out and she was there as she had always been, all other love rejected. And yet that memory brought disquiet now that felt like fear.

The snow that earlier had flecked the landscape fell heavily. In the distance, Worley Edge was obscured and they went no further.

"How well you taught me to imagine," Mary Bella murmured, the softness of her tone not quite conveying the irony of her observation. But what she said was taken by the wind and she did no repeat it. That something demanded more of her was a silent echo on the long walk back, an intimation that would not declare itself yet still was there.

The yard was quiet when they reached it, the men already gone home. The empty house was warm, the blind dog waiting.

❦

The snow fell for days, was blown into drifts, accumulated on the roofs of sheds, on windowsills and frozen panes, changed the shape of water-butts and mounting-blocks. It was confining too.

On the schoolroom table Anthony had spread out an unfinished map of street alterations in Dijon, four paperweights holding it in place, his inks and pens in orderly rows beside it. The table had been put to other uses since he and Mary Bella had shared it in the past – seed potatoes had sprouted on it, apples kept from touching one another, brass and silver polished, china and porcelain repaired. This morning it was shared again, Mary Bella going through the farm accounts at the other end of it.

She would make curtains for the curtainless windows, she had a moment ago decided. And the daisy wallpaper, badly sunburnt, stained and faded, could be renewed. The white paint of the skirting-board and the picture-rail could be, and the paintwork of the door and the window-frames. Their room they called it, and always would.

"All right?" she heard Anthony ask. Then he looked up and smiled at her before he returned to what he'd been doing.

Often she dreamed of the household she could not prevent herself from imagining. And often she lay awake, telling herself that he was right, that people lived with what happened to them, that people had to. Marriage fell apart, he said; it was not unusual. His child was a sensible child, he said; she would be again. One day they would be glad they had held on.

But at night, while Anthony slept, confusion crept into the empty dark, bewilderment became a tiredness, and Mary Bella heard her own slight whisper speaking of a child who had been damaged, a damaged woman too. She remembered pity from long ago when in an accident one of the workmen lost an arm. She had pitied her mother in pain, and a girl at Evelynscourt who was despised, and the blind spaniel who followed her about the house. Challenging the love that kept her silent, her pity now seemed presumptuous when it came in the night, not belonging in an expected way as it had before. Yet still she pitied.

"Yes, I'm all right," she said, and smiled a little too.

In a dream, occurring often, his child was dead and he stood by the grave, alone, flowers spread on the clay. And she watched, hidden by trees, not wanting to be parted from him.

❦

"You are unhappy," Anthony said one evening in the kitchen when they had finished supper.

Carrying plates and dishes to the sink Mary Bella shook her head but did not answer. Not turning round, she scoured a saucepan she had left on the draining-board to steep.

Anthony waited, then dried the dishes he was handed one by one warm from the steaming water. At peace, the old dog slept in his corner.

"Amelia is herself again," Anthony said. "You do know that?"

"Yes, I do know."

"What is it, Mary Bella?"

"A silliness."

She had told herself this moment would come, yet had believed that it might not, that the invasion of her thoughts, no matter how persistent, would slip away, each day, each night becoming less troubled than the one before.

"It's over now," Anthony said. "The awfulness of that time."

It wasn't over. Since memory would not allow it to be over, it never would be. The damaged do not politely go away, instead release their demons. That must be so, she could not think that it was different.

Soothing and patient, his voice went on. His smile was tender. She loved his pale blue eyes, his hands, his lips, the way he stood, and moved, his quiet laughter. But still his words were nothing. He did not understand.

She tried to say that what had been a wisp of doubt flourished now as premonition, but thought became confusion, did not connect, would not communicate. They could not change themselves, could only simulate what was not so.

With that simplicity a loneliness began for Mary Bella that was more than loneliness had ever been before. Belittling the solitude she had so often known, it was mysterious too, coming as it did while she still had the companionship she valued more than any other. "It's foolishness, all this," Anthony said.

There was no anger in his tone, no edge of irritation. But both would come when patience had worn itself out. There'd be indifference then, disdain, contempt. Why did she know? Why did he not? He'd been the teacher once.

❦

The night was slow. Its slowness was their hope, the dawdling hands of the clock on the windowsill their chance to settle what had been disturbed. Time was their genius, Anthony had said: emptily passing, it had held their love before it made of it a high romance.

"We're happy surely?" He pressed his presumption just a little. "Shouldn't we be sensible too?"

But the disturbance that had come did not give up its ground.

❦

The men called out to one another in the yard, early-morning energy in their voices. The herd was driven from the fields for milking. Buckets rattled. Softly a transistor played. In the kitchen, through ragged tiredness, conversation stumbled on.

"How slightly we know ourselves until something happens." Mary Bella broke a silence that had lasted. "How blurred the edges are: what we can do, what in the end we can't. What nags, what doesn't."

Anthony stroked her hair and held her, wanting to for ever. "Your courage is extraordinary," he said.

❦

One of the men came in with the morning milk and eggs. Anthony took the milk can from him and filled two blue-and-white kitchen jugs, pouring what remained into a saucepan for their coffee. "A better day?" he asked and the man said it was brighter than recent days had been. Mary Bella cut bread for toast.

❦

When spring was about to come and then did not, one morning Anthony wasn't there. Waking early, Mary Bella heard the car.

The men knew more. They'd seen his belongings carried from the house. He'd said good-bye, had shaken their hands. They waved when he drove off, then watched the car becoming nothing on the distant moors.

His clothes, his inks, his pens, unfinished Dijon, his books: all these were gone. Only the old town of Kishinev remained, as he intended it should, a part of him still there.

❦

She knows his journey, where he will stop, where once he spent a night but has not since and will not now. It will be dusk when he arrives.

She slices gammon, two slices for each plate, the men in turn come for their food. The sun has reached the kitchen, as at this time in spring and summer it always does. Sometimes in the schoolroom he pulled the curtains over. It will be dusk when he arrives.

She takes her own plate to the table and is deferred to there. In kindness, because kindness is his way, he'll call upon prevarication and deceit, his lies of mercy all he can offer the wife he now returns to. He'll make of love a wild infatuation that did not last and now is over.

The talk at the table is as it always is, about the morning's work, some of it finished, some not yet, about the weather, the forecast for tomorrow. Mary Bella plays a part, for she is used to that. He will be tired, but even so he'll manage for that too is his way. His grateful wife will not reject him, the broken pieces of what is shattered will be gathered.

The altered fencing of a field is now complete, new gates put in, so she is told, a stile that wasn't there before. He will not come back, not once, not ever. There'll be no tawdry attempt at a revival, no searching in the falsity for something that might be better than nothing.

The men push back their chairs, the shuffling of their boots noisy on the red-tiled floor. Mary Bella senses an anxiety, and pity perhaps. She doesn't try to smile any of that away, only wishes the men could know that love, unchanged, is as it was, is there for him among her shadows, for her in rooms and places as familiar to him as they are to her. She wishes they could know it will not wither, that there'll be no long slow dying, or love made ordinary.

Photograph: Jane Bown

•William Trevor is an Irish short-story writer and novelist, who has lived in England since the 1950s. He has won the Whitbread prize three times and has been nominated five times for the Booker prize, most recently for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin literary award in 2011